Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Must Have Life-long Learning Tools and Strategies for Teachers

A teacher is a life long learner, in fact, everyone should be a lifelong learner, but the difference between us ( teachers and educators ) and others is that we have no choice but to be life long learners. We can not stop learning for fear that we might be outrun by our students. Thanks to technology and digital literacy , there are now a variety of ways for us to improve and work on our learning plans. We can for instance use social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest..ect to connect with other like minded teachers and learn from their experiences and share with them ours. This collaboration could even develop into advanced level by creating or joining Personal Learning Networks.

Here are some posts to help you use popular social media for life long learning purposes :

As avid readers of this blog ( I am happy many of you are), you have had the chance to discover several of the ways we use to leverage technology to serve our professional development growth and I have many more to share with you over the next coming weeks.Today, however, I want to share with you one strategy I personally use to keep my ' intellectual ' knowledge as a teacher fresh and up to date: Reading recent researches in the educational field.

Ask yourself this question: what do I know about education, pedagogy, teaching, and learning other than what I have learned from my under graduate courses ? If you feel your heart throbs faster trying to come up with an answer then you are lacking in raw materials. It is like driving in snow but with summer tires on. Of course you can still drive but the possibilities of making an accident are higher and knowing that your driving is risky because it is lacking in something makes you drive tensely and the toll takes on your nerves and by the end of a driving day you feel totally exhausted.

This is the same situation some teachers find themselves in when using the old pedagogy ( and therefore its underlying literature ) in teaching 21st century students. Our students need us to lead them not lag behind and to effectively play this leading role, you need to keep abreast of the new and emerging educational researches being published every now and then in different periodicals and journals. But how can I keep track of the latest researches in my field ? Well I was waiting for this question and again let me share with something I personally do. Working on this blog introduced me to several great trusted educational resources that I have been checking regularly for some time now. These resources feature new educational researches, high quality educational content and many more.Below are but some examples ( I repeat just some because I have a lot and it will take me more than a single post to include them all here ). I will be talking about the second strategy I use for growing professionally in a future post so make sure to stay tuned. Enjoy the list below:

I cant start this list without Harvard Education being on the top of it. Harvard alone speaks volume for itself and this is a website where you can have access to the recent articles, books, and many other educational material written by the best educators in the world.